“It was all my fault. He was under my care, and I was careless.”
It was a balm to my heart, listening to his devotion to his men. That mention of a wife had murdered me where I sat. Penelope. Had I been a substitute for her, I do not think I could have borne it.
But no. I was a substitute for those he had failed. Those he had broken with. Those he had deserted, or abandoned, or simply been helpless to save.
I was his redemption. But not his love.
Penelope. It was good to have a name. To hate. To pity. To staunch the festering wound of his self-possession. Penelope. By his telling, she had him only two years. I, seven. That was victory, was it not?
No. Not if he still wished to return to her. Or was that another oath he meant to keep. And how awful it must have been, to be tied by one oath to me, another to her, and longing to keep them both.
When the tale was over, it was only natural that there be a feast, and he was plied with questions, my sons demanding more and more from him, wringing each ounce of heroism and adventure their young hearts could absorb.
I departed in silence and, for once, unobserved. Or so I thought.
The path up the cliff at night was far more treacherous, yet somehow more beautiful. Cut off by shadow, vision gave way to the other senses. The crisp scent of the cypresses, the rush and hush of the waves. And tonight a crescent moon reflected on the sea, illumining only a narrow path from the Azure Gate out into the vast beyond.
From the palace, one could climb the cliff to my grove, or else descend to the caves. But the caves had been flooded ever since the storm, and unused by all save one.
I chose to climb. There was no falter in my step now, no unbalance as I crested the vine-covered gate and stepped into the Grove of Calypso. The goddess was restored. At the cost of the woman.
In the light of Orion, of the Plowman and the Wagon, I gazed at my own likeness carved in stone, wondering what it was like to be her. So tranquil. So beautiful. So very, very large, towering over me like a mother before her babe. And like a babe, I sat at her feet and gazed at the unseeable world, feeling feelings and thinking thoughts I could not yet comprehend. But at the core was peace. No, not peace. A sorrowful contentment. Certainty of what was right, made sweet by the exquisite pain of sacrifice.
Sacrifice. To make a thing holy. It was beautiful to think my love was holy. And my happiness. For those were the sacrifices this night.
An owl hooted, and the breeze rustled the trees. Athena’s blessing. I had heeded Hermes’s message, and she was pleased. But had he not called himself her champion? Was it for Athena that I was freeing him? If that was her wisdom, I could not dispute it.
Below, there came a grinding of sandal on stone. He let me hear his step, giving me time to rise and compose myself. He had followed me, then, as I had both hoped and dreaded. Emerging into the grove, his dark hair turned silver by the moon, he paused to gaze at us both, stone goddess and flesh woman. Like her, I held out my hands.
He took mine, not hers. “Why tonight?”
A simple question, that. The answer, complex.
Because seven years is long enough.
Because my sons are men.
Because I can ask no more of you.
Because I can no longer bear your smiles.
Instead I broke yet another vow made to myself. “Because I am with child.”
His brow rose—his left brow, the sinister trickster. “I wondered if you would tell me.”
He had known. It was enough to force an uncertain laugh from me. “Monster. How you divine my secrets.”
“And do you now hope that, free, I will decide to stay to raise my daughter.”
No less than I deserved, yet far more than he ought to have said. “What a wicked thing you are. Just because your mind bends to tricks and deceits, you see them in everyone.” I gestured to my stone self behind me. “Let her be my witness, by the grimmest oaths a goddess can swear, I have no plot to keep you. Nor would I harm you. Ever. Not stone, trust me, is the heart within this breast.”
He had the good grace to be ashamed. “Forgive me. You do hope it will be a daughter? Another Calypso to rule after you?”
“I do.”
Placing his hands on my shoulders, he kissed the crown of my head. “Then I hope so too.”
Unbidden, unwelcome, unworthy, tears welled hot behind my eyes. “She will never know you.”
“Of course she will. Through her brothers, who are the best sons a man could wish to have. Through the island, that bears the best of her father’s invention, and none of the stains of his sins. And through her mother, who is far kinder than any goddess I have ever worshipped.”
I wanted to say, “If a boy, I shall name him after you. I can offer you immortality of a sort.” But I knew he would have no son by me. His son was born, and named, and raised. By his wife.
“Is she more beautiful than I?” I could not help myself. It was a night for shame, it seemed.
“Hardly. She falls far short of you—your beauty, your stature. Her voice is unmelodious, the opposite of yours. But I long to see my home, pine to give my son what I have imparted to yours. Perhaps, one day, I will send him here, and they can be friends.”
He was such a skilled liar, I could not tell if he spoke the truth of her. Of Penelope. But because he did not praise her, I knew then the love he held for his wife. His Penelope. Like his smiles, his kindness was vicious, and cut me worse than bronze.
I wept then, and he held me, though I refused to cling to him. In tatters, I clung to what little self-respect was left to me.
When the worst of the torrent was past, I tried to smile at him through the veil of my own sorrow. “You must go soon. Your raft needs provisions.”
It was good to witness the trickster tricked a second time. “You knew.” He laughed. “You knew!”
My turn to smile. “How could I not? Your restless nights were not spent by my side. It has been ready for, what, five years? Waiting in the flooded caves below. I trust it will float?”
“I hope, or I’ve lost every trick I ever learned.” Again he smiled with his eyes. “If you wanted to shock me, you’ve done so tonight.”
“Is it such a shock to be free?”
“Yes.” Seeing my expression, he quickly amended his bald statement. “It is not shocking to receive your generosity. You have offered it ever since I arrived. No, it is a shock to think I have fulfilled my oath.”
“You have, and more.” I reached up to caress his cheek. No more salt from tears would stain it. Only the salt of the sea. “I have kept you longer than I should.”
“The will of the goddess. You kept me as long as you felt you must.”
“No. I did not keep you here as a goddess. I kept you as a woman.”
The crook of a smile, a real smile, at the corner of his mouth. “I know.”
I hit him then, with real force. “I know you know, you fiend! A kinder man would allow me to confess in silence.”
He sighed, rubbing where I’d struck as if it hurt. “A kinder man would not have you confess at all.”
Stepping close again, I rested my head against his shoulder. “I do not think I could love a kind man as I have loved you.”
“I’m gratified. What was the other?”
He gazed at me. Then, in a voice quite unlike any I had heard him use, he said, “All my life I wanted to learn something profound. Only here, on this island, in this place, did I have the time to reflect on all my journeys, on all I have seen and all I have done, and prize free the single profound truth I have encountered along the way.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s a thing a poet once said, round a fire one winter night as we waged our endless war. He said that all tragedies come from people loving something they had no business loving. Menelaus loved Helen. Helen loved herself. Agamemnon loved power. Iphigenia loved Achilles. Achilles loved his own legend. Ajax loved war. Hector loved honor.”
“And you? What did Odyss
eus love, that he should not?”
It would have been kind, to say “Calypso”. But, as he had already noted, he was not a kind man. “My own cleverness. Better to be dull and happy than clever and alone.” He took my hand. “Goddess. I do not deserve your love.”
“Do you believe so? Perhaps. But a man so tortured—by fate, by nature, by his own mind—who devotes himself to kindness? Is he not more deserving of love than a man who is kind by nature?”
Looking down, he shook his head, and was right not to answer. It is not up to the loved to determine their worthiness. It is up to us who love. Who adore.
“There is the man you are,” I told him, “and the man you wish to be. Never cease striving to be the latter. Only make allowances for the lesser. You cannot be all things, and when you try, you cannot even be one.”
Eyes averted, his mouth twitched at the corners. “That is the second piece of profound knowledge I have gained on Ogygia.”
“Am I profound?”
“You are.”
“I am gratified. But you have missed the real profundity of your time here. You could have left long ago, but for your oath.”
“Have I not been faithful?” he said doggedly, his eyes down, his head swinging from side to side. “Have I not kept my word?”
Taking his head in my hands, like a child’s, I raised his eyes to mine. “It is not a matter of breaking promises, my love. The cause of all your tragedies is making promises you must not keep.”
Unable to bear it, he reeled from me. Now it was his turn to weep. Unlike me, he preferred to weep alone.
Yet he did not leave the grove. For once, I was permitted to witness his tears. A night for gifts.
Standing below my statue, I spoke once more, not as woman, but as goddess. “Love cannot compel. Love can only accept. And, perhaps, inspire. If I inspire you, then that is enough.” Then, as woman, I took down my own hair. “My Odd Zeus. God of my heart. Let me breathe for you.”
His head rose, his body followed. Enfolding me, his arms held not art, nor artifice. His need was real, the twin of mine. In the dawn he would board the raft in the caves beneath us. He would sail it out beneath the Azure Gate, past the breakers, and off into the wine-dark sea.
And I? I would have my statue turned. It would no longer face the cave, but rather the open water and sky. And I would watch him go, and sing him on his way, and never let fall my hair again.
That night, in the Grove of Calypso, beneath my offering hands, we made love for the last time. No longer a vow. It was just truth.
And my everlasting tragedy.
The King in Waiting
Russell Whitfield
The Phaeacians have provisioned me well. Well enough so that I might return to my kingdom in the trappings of kingship and not as the beggar who washed up on their shores.
I will return everything that has been given to me with advantages. As I write, I feel the strength of a younger man flowing through my veins. I am as keen as a youngster to see my Penelope again so that I might put this—all of this—behind me and lose myself in the sanctuary of her arms.
-Odysseus
Part I: The Suitor
The smell of cooked meat hung heavy in the air, the dissonant cacophony of laughter and drunken conversation echoed about the walls of what had once been Odysseus’s house. A citadel it was not; it had walls and was many roomed, but the home of the absent Ithacan king was nothing like the mighty structures one imagined of such a “brilliant” king would posses.
But, for all its parochialism, the great hall had still once been a fine place with statuary, scrubbed stone and rich fabrics adorning the walls. Now—with all the suitors in nightly attendance, it had become a grubby shade of its former self—uncared for and unloved. The specter of the missing king was always with them, Amphinomus thought as he eyed the great Bow of Odysseus that hung—unstrung—on the wall. It was massive—perhaps fifteen hands in length; tall as most men. The second most impressive thing in the room.
The first was the queen.
Penelope.
Amphinomus put the cup to his lips, the movement to hide another stolen glance at her over its brazen rim. At thirty-five, Penelope was coveted by these men not for what her loins could bear them: at her age, she could carry no more sons. No—whomsoever she chose would be—before the gods—the replacement for Odysseus. That’s what most men there wanted. To be the king.
And if Amphinomus was honest with himself, that’s what he had wanted too. That had been the ambition—right up until he’d become old enough to learn what it was to want a woman. People still spoke of Helen, her flawless perfection that even Cronos seemed unable to touch, of the seductress Chryseis who had caused Agamemnon to bring down a plague on the Achaeans and of Penthesilea, the Amazon Queen whose beauty had made Achilles weep. Amphinomus had never laid eyes on any of them, but he knew—in his heart—that he would choose Penelope over them all.
He risked another glance and could see distaste in her eyes as she surveyed the debauch in what had once been her husband’s hall. Antinous, all bluff muscle, dark-beard and ill-informed opinion had begun singing. He fancied he had a tune, but the truth was he sounded like a wine-fart in a conch-horn. However, his sword arm and left hook stayed a man’s tongue from advising him of such; drunk or sober, armed or unarmed—the son of Eupeithes was a lethal bastard.
Lethal and loud.
Only handsome Eurymachus, son of Polybus, blonde haired and green-eyed, was stronger. Not physically, of course, but in power, simply because he was the richest of the suitors and likeliest to win the hand of Penelope.
Amphinomus detected the merest shake of Penelope’s head at Antinous’s loud antics, her peerless eyes, delightfully crinkled at the sides, flicked to her son, Telemachus—the lad deep in conversation with an older man who Amphinomus did not recognize. As the queen’s eyes fell on the boy, her face softened, a mother’s love writ large before the stoic mask fell once again.
Amphinomus tipped back his wine and reveled a little in his own melancholy, feeling that purest hopelessness of unrequited love that only the half-drunk could feel. And the bitterness. He hated his fellow suitors, their harsh, manly laughter, their lewdness, their talk of what they would do when they “got hold of her”. Put a smile on that cold face…I’ll make her come around to my way…and of course…I’ll bet she’s desperate for it.
All Amphinomus wanted to do was hold her in his arms, kiss her and tell her that now he was hers, he would make things right for her—for them…until her son was ready to rule. He would never admit out loud, though, that his desire for the queen mattered more to him than the acquisition of territory and power. And it cut him to the core that, unless the foam born Cypriot herself intervened, it was a love he had little chance of winning.
Eventually, Antinous bored of his ear-shattering singing (or rather, bored of the lack of attention it was garnering) took to drinking contests with Eurymachus, the two men like wary boxers both friends and adversaries.
Despite the pettiness of it, Amphinomus envied Eurymachus’s looks and bearing. Unlike that pretty prince, he looked like a farmer—shorter than most, broad shouldered, red-haired and stocky. But his farmer’s look was the will of the gods and there was nothing to be done about it.
Was it, he wondered, hubris to wish that he possessed beauty? After all, look at all the trouble beauty had caused in Troy. Ten Years of War—over a woman. Before Penelope, Amphinomus had scoffed at the foolishness and weakness of such men who would call themselves heroes.
Before Penelope.
Now he understood. He himself would make war for a thousand years for her. He would, he knew, die for her. Ironic then that she probably didn’t even know his name amongst these others who had come to win her hand. He had to compete, he told himself.
But how, Amekhania—the daimon of all men’s doubt—sibilant whisper echoed in his mind. You are not as handsome as Eurymachus—nor as rich. And as skilled with spear and chariot as you are,
you are no match for Antinous. There was truth in that; the taste of the thought was as bitter as the wine on his tongue.
Amphinomus heard the delicate tone of the bard’s lyre wind its way through the masculine hubbub as cool and welcome as a woman’s hand on their thighs.
Phemius was a good spinner of tales—a mournful looking man who wore his greying hair long at the sides and back despite his balding pate; he could hold a tune and played well enough to silence even the louts that had made Penelope’s home their own. His song was slow and full of sadness on this night which, truth be told, suited Amphinomus’s melancholy rather well. The bard sang of Agamemnon and of Menelaus and trials they faced on their homeward journeys—he gave it full, gloomy voice but the glittering anger in his eyes told Amphinomus that he’d been put up to this mien against his will.
Phemius’s voice lifted then as he sang of those other heroes, lost on their way home and their wives who waited—in vain—for their return. Wives that pined away and would die in grief, loveless and unwilling to love…
“Bard!” Penelope’s golden voice cut across the song, stilling both the singer’s fingers and his tongue. “By all the gods, sing a song of joy in these, my husband’s halls. Or do you seek to wound me by your allusions?”
You tell him, Amphinomus thought, feeling the grin spread lax across his face. What a woman she was.
But Telemachus spoke then. “By all the gods? Mother, you are queen in Ithaca. By all the gods, act like it. Phemius is telling stories—I would not have my mother shame my father by showing her weakness in front of our…guests.”
He spat the word and, despite himself, Amphinomus sat up—interested and impressed. Not often—no, not ever, had the boy spoken out. And he didn’t sound anywhere near drunk either. He was right too: guest-friendship was sacred and he, along with the rest of the suitors, had pissed all over it by their actions.
A Sea of Sorrow Page 28